Ben Lowry: Niedermayer documentary tells the story of a truly wicked IRA murder of a fine businessman - and is one of the best films about the Troubles

The German businessman, whose plant in Northern Ireland made tape recorders, had a terrorist join his workforce.

This was not of itself particularly unusual or unlucky. In the early 1970s thousands of people were involved with paramilitary bodies, and hundreds if not thousands of employers had some of them on their staff. What made the arrival of this employee so unfortunate was that he was not some low-level operative in a violent group but rather one of the most ruthless terrorists of all. He would go on to lead by far the largest paramilitary organisation, the Provisional IRA. And within that movement he was greatly respected but also feared –and perhaps, by some members, hated.

Brian Keenan, the man in question, became a union shop steward at Grundig and managed to clash frequently with the popular and even-tempered Mr Niedermayer. The latter’s bad luck was compounded by the fact few German citizens lived in Northern Ireland then so he became that nation’s honorary consul to NI when the IRA was trying to gain an international profile. In late 1973 events unfolded that gave Keenan reason to exploit his knowledge of Mr Niedermayer: two top republicans, Dolours and Marian Price, were jailed in England over a bombing campaign there. That Christmas the Grundig boss was kidnapped at home by the IRA, in demand for the return of the Price sisters to the province.

The tragic outworkings of those developments are told in a new documentary, Face Down, that is playing to rapt audiences in Belfast. I viewed the 90-minute film at the Queen’s Film Theatre (QFT) on Thursday night, where its run is extended into next week. It is an overpowering experience. Many reports and documentaries and TV dramas and movies have been produced about the Troubles, so I hesitate to say it is the best – but it is certainly up among them. (article continues, scroll down)

It is the first that I can think of in many years that looks solely at an IRA atrocity, a subject which has fallen out of favour for media investigations and is now barely ever the focus of legal or police probes. It is no surprise to me that retrospective support for the IRA is soaring among young people: I have been predicting it for 20+ years, since unionists accepted ‘collusion’ as central to the Troubles at the 2001 Weston Park talks.

Article continues, scroll down (And click here for Ben Lowry’s article last week on how London needs to conduct its own review into PSNI breach)

This film about Mr Niedermayer rightly sidesteps the wider legacy debate – It just focuses on the fate that befell him and the devastating impact on his widow, Ingeborg, their daughters Renate and Gabriele, and Gabriele's husband, Robin Williams-Powell. The movie travels to Australia to interview Rachel, daughter of Gabriele, and Devon to film her sister Tanya Williams-Powell, who as children knew almost nothing about their grandfather. There is also footage from Germany.

The documentary began as an excellent book, ‘The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer’ by the Belfast and Cambridge-educated broadcaster David Blake Knox, who produces this film. The explanatory subtitles in the film use the word terrorist, a term which was common pre 1998 when IRA violence was widely regarded as such on both sides of the border and by all western nations, but which is mostly now replaced by neutral words such as combatant. The production does not shy away from the fact that this is a story of wickedness in which the IRA are wholly culpable and in which the RUC officers are impressive. Unlike some cowardly storytellers, the film makers have not been panicked by the political rise of Irish republicans into introducing a gratuitous balance that has no relevance to this tale, for example by becoming part of a despicable trend to find police investigative failures into IRA murders as a sly way of spreading the blame – as if such failures are equivalent to the deed itself.

The only time I reported up close on Brian Keenan was 20 years ago when I was sent to Crossmaglen to cover the funeral of a 24-year-old IRA member Keith Rogers, who in 2003 had been shot dead in south Armagh in a feud. Keenan spoke furiously from the graveside.

I remember having the initial impression that it was a foul-mouthed tirade: ‘… f***ing degenerates … f***ing criminals … a band of f***ing vermin ...’ etc. But when I listened back to a recording he had not in fact sworn. He had indeed used all those the words ‘criminals,’ ‘vermin,’ ‘degenerates’ and others such as ‘traitor’ but had not used accompanying four-letter abuse. It was just the force and loathing with which he spat out his denunciation that made it seem like he was also swearing.

Someone who is familiar with the Niedermayer case tells me that he was feared by junior IRA volunteers: “They were more scared of going back to him and saying they had not carried out their orders than they were of the British Army.”

Over the years I have read reports that suggest that Keenan despised Martin McGuinness, believing he had set him up for arrest, but others that say that underneath a hardline exterior he backed the McGuinness/Gerry Adams peace moves. The documentary depicts an intense personality, “mesmerising” says someone, but one that is brutal when in killing mode.

Mr Niedermayer was by all accounts a loving family man and a kind employer. He moved his entire family to Northern Ireland at a time of economic hardship and lived happily in a Catholic area among many of his employees (his workforce was mixed, the Dunmurry factory being between republican and loyalist areas). That he stayed in this society past its most violent year, 1972, rather than flee to the safety of his home country as I suspect most people would have done, makes his abduction, then long disappearance before his death was confirmed, all the more heinous.

Do go to the QFT. I also think the film should be shown en masse to teenagers who increasingly think that the IRA were the victims – and no wonder, in the absence hitherto of anyone showing them evidence to the contrary.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor